Katie Byrne: The complex issue of slut shaming
‘Slut shaming in schools is more complex than we think’
Kudos to Roisin Nic Lochlainn, the young woman who spoke on Tuesday’s about a horrific experience she had when she was 17. Three years ago, during a night out with friends, Roisin had sex in public that she was too drunk to remember.
The next day she discovered that the incident had been recorded by girls in her class and the clip had been widely circulated on messaging platforms. She didn’t leave her bedroom for the entire weekend, she told Joe Duffy. In school on the Monday, she was met with silence, whispers and stifled laughs.
“The whole year would talk about how disgusting I was,” she said.
There’s a separate, and no less important, conversation to be had about the recording of people in their most vulnerable moments and the culpable complicity of those who share that content far and wide.
However, what really stood out to me while listening to Roisin’s story is how little things seem to have changed. It’s easy to assume that young women of Roisin’s generation are coming of age in much more progressive times. Louise O’Neill’s
is discussed in schools. Slut-shaming is part of modern vernacular (it wasn’t in my day).
But it seems things are no better. Actually, the advent of social media has just made things a lot worse.
Slut-shaming is a deeply traumatic formative experience for a young woman but we can’t get a proper handle on it until we understand just how complex an issue it is — especially in a school scenario.
Slut-shaming in schools isn’t simply the singling out of women who are perceived to be sexually promiscuous. Broadly speaking, it’s the singling out of women who don’t fit the norm.
Young women who develop large breasts early in life are slut-shamed by young men who illogically equate breast size with sexual promiscuity.
Young women who reject the advances of young men are slut-shamed for their sexual discernment. “Women seem wicked when you’re unwanted,” as Jim Morrison beautifully put it.
And it’s not just men who slut-shame women. Women are slut-shamed by other women in all-girls schools — and it’s often a very specific type of woman that is targeted.
For the most part, the young women who are singled out as sluts don’t fit into the social hierarchy of schools or any of the cookie-cutter identities (sporty, studious, etc.) that are available to them.
They are outsiders and should they behave in a way that is perceived to be sexually promiscuous — even once — they will suffer the consequences of a culture that needs to put neat labels on people.
In other cases, they don’t respect the hierarchy of school dating or the territorial nature of crushes. Sometimes a young woman is singled out as a slut simply for pairing off with the wrong person.
Roisin wondered why her friends just stared and recorded instead of checking to see if she was OK. Writing on Twitter, she said the circulation of it afterwards amounted to “revenge porn”.
What happened to her was cruel and wrong, but sadly, not uncommon. The recording and sharing of sexual videos is not unusual among teenagers. In
‘The young women who are singled out as sluts often don’t fit into the social hierarchy of schools’
fact, it’s a problem that is often overlooked by parents and teachers who simply don’t know how to deal with it.
We can blame it on social media, smart phones and the ‘I share, therefore I am’ culture that they were born into. However, we should also ask if things would be different if teenagers had a comprehensive social-emotional and sexual education.
When young women are slutshamed, whether it involves photos and videos or not, it usually involves a fairly clinical post-mortem of what they did or didn’t do. Their peers are disgusted yet fascinated; appalled yet intrigued. Slut-shaming is part moralistic and part prurient, which is why young women are often egged on before they engage in sexual behaviour and casually degraded afterwards.
In the absence of a comprehensive sexual education, you could argue that slut-shaming is a form of vicarious sexual experimentation for teenagers.
And considered from that point of view, perhaps it’s inevitable that one young woman in every class, group and neighbourhood is going to be singled out and stigmatised until we do something about it.
Thanks to Roisin, we’re finally talking about slut-shaming in schools. The next step is for parents and teachers to understand what (and who) is really behind it.